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Measure where the time actually goes
Before automating anything, find out what your team is really doing. The answer is almost never “solving hard problems.”
In most teams the breakdown looks roughly like this:
- Working out who should handle a request
- Finding context that already exists somewhere
- Answering the same question for the ninth time
- Actually solving something difficult
Only the last one needs a person with experience. The first three are where the hours go.
Automate the boring middle
The instinct is to automate the top of the funnel — deflect tickets before they arrive. It’s appealing and it mostly annoys people, because the tickets that get deflected are the ones the customer already tried to self-serve.
The better target is the middle: everything between a request arriving and the right person having enough context to answer it. It’s unglamorous, nobody demos it, and it’s where the time is.
Watch for the shortcuts that backfire
A few things that look like wins and aren’t:
Aggressive auto-closing. Tickets go down, satisfaction goes down further, and the same issue comes back next week with an angrier tone.
Macros without judgement. A canned answer sent to the wrong person costs more trust than a slow answer.
Deflection measured as success. If your only metric is tickets avoided, you’ll optimise for making it hard to reach you.
Keep a human in the loop where it counts
The goal isn’t a team that touches nothing. It’s a team whose time goes to the things only people can do — the ambiguous, the sensitive, and the genuinely broken.
Everything else should arrive pre-sorted, pre-contexted, and ready to answer. That’s a smaller change than replacing your support team, and it’s the one that actually holds up when the next step change arrives.
